AMD announces world's first 7 nm GPU: 'Radeon Instinct' to target AI, ML tasks

AMD today unveiled what is the world’s first 7 nm GPU , and the first GPUs that fully support PCIe 4.0 features. Unfortunately, these new GPUs aren’t meant for gamers.

Labelled as Radeon Instinct MI50 and MI60, the new GPUs, despite being called graphics cards, are designed for machine learning and AI tasks. The use of a 7 nm process, one which even Intel is yet to crack, means that the GPUs can be far more efficient, running faster and consuming less power. Compliance with PCIe 4.0 specifications means that the GPU can communicate at a much higher bandwidth and lower latency than previous designs.

To add to this, the GPUs both feature support for HBM2 (High Bandwidth Memory 2), which gives them a whopping 1 TB/s bandwidth to play around with. Better yet, using AMD’s Infinity Fabric, which vastly improves data bandwidth between compatible components, is supported between graphics cards. What this means is that the MI60 and MI50 can be paired with up to 4 other MI60s and MI50s, allowing for a communication speed of over 200 MB/s.

For the applications being targeted by Instinct, this bandwidth is critical.

The cards feature support for various types of complex computing tasks, more than the traditional GPU, making them more suited for High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. Features like built-in support for virtualisation are a boon for cloud service providers.

AMD has also released an Application Development Environment for Instinct GPUs as well as its EPYC and Ryzen CPUs.